Recently the special Developer Stream Q&A Edition took place on the Armored Warfare Twitch channel, in which Richard Taylor, the Lead Developer of Armored Warfare talked about the upcoming changes to the game.
Here are some of the most important changes and fixes planned for Armored Warfare based on community feedback.
Question: Update 0.16 is bringing a fix to the Shot Delay issue. What exactly will be done?
Answer: We have tackled this from multiple directions. It's a complicated issue in regards to server performance, network latency and packet travel time. In Update 0.16, the priority of shot messages was increased in order for them to transfer faster. Other changes include server prediction. Overall, the feedback has been very positive on the test server, but it's definitely something we will monitor carefully on the live server. You can read more about Shot Delay in the preview article.
Question: What about the issue where vehicles shoot players while their turrets are facing in the opposite direction?
Answer: This issue was a result of server and client desync – the server thought the turret was facing a different direction to what the client saw. We have improved client-server synchronization to fix this issue in Update 0.16. We don't expect players to see it anymore.
Question: What will happen to the unintended high-tier MBT weakspots?
Answer: These are really small – just one or two "magic pixels" the players can shoot to penetrate the front. These weakspots are a byproduct of normalization and overmatch mechanics working together to create an unintended side-effect. What happened was that armor-piercing shells had their trajectory adjusted by the normalization mechanism to impact on a very thin surface, like the belly of the tank or the top of the turret, and the overmatch mechanism guaranteed that the shell would penetrate the armor. This caused the appearance of weakspots where players didn't expect them – like near the threads. This is being addressed in Update 0.16 – the shells will no longer normalize on super-thin surfaces, which will effectively disable these unintended weakspots.
Question: What about high-tier balance and power creep?
Answer: This is something we are actively evaluating. One of the big things we are looking into is vehicle health and damage scaling from tier to tier. We are not happy with the differences between tiers being too big. We will make major changes to hitpoint and damage scaling to make it flatter. Another thing we are looking into is the time-to-kill value (how much longer a vehicle under fire survives), as it is currently too short. The third thing to be addressed is the accuracy stacking – we want the vehicles accurate, but certain retrofits and crew bonuses improve it too much. We are likely to adjust this stacking. Our goal is to make interaction between the tiers more interesting.
Question: Tell us your plans for the issue where AI vehicles spawn right next to players?
Answer: Yes, this is really frustrating. In Update 0.17, the spawn system will be overhauled – the new system will take player location and line of sight into account. No more random spawns behind you!
Question: Are you doing anything to address the AI artillery not giving players enough time to react?
Answer: This is another issue that's been on our radar for a while. It is caused by the older PvE maps being quite small – the artillery would spawn close to players. We are making the new PvE maps bigger now. Artillery will spawn further away, giving players more time to react. This is not the only solution we are considering, but it's the first step.
Question: Are there any plans to improve Armored Warfare physics?
Answer: Vehicle physics are a high priority for us. We are working on it little by little, as the risk of unintended side-effects is quite high. In Update 0.16, we addressed the issue where some environmental objects slowed tanks down too much upon collision. In Update 0.17, vehicle to vehicle collision will be improved as well. The next step after that will be wheeled vehicle handling.
Question: What about the plans to support the competitive aspect of Armored Warfare?
Answer: The Lords of War is the first head to head PvP competition mode, built around organized teamplay. It's the first stepping stone towards a large battalion versus battalion competition. The Lords of War mode is designed to be easy to get into and it also supports solo queue. We will soon start Season 0 of the mode, after which we will gather feedback, make changes to the mode based on it and start Season 1. This is not the only team mode we are developing, our intent is to develop more PvP team modes and rotate them regularly.
Question: Will you make the maps bigger with more playable areas?
Answer: This is something we are looking into. Our first attempt to make a big map was the Reactor map, but not all the space is accessible to players. We took the feedback to heart and now have two very large maps nearly completed. One of them will be closer to Reactor in size but more open, the second will be even bigger.
Question: The bug fixes are great, but what about new features?
Answer: Absolutely, there are a lot of things in progress right now. One of the things we are looking into is ATGM performance. We want to make missiles relevant on high tiers – we will look into how APS operates, right now it's like an invincibility shield versus ATGMs with a cooldown. We are thinking about making the APS system an active component, with players having to activate it to make it work. We are also considering introducing more APS types.
That's it for today. See you on the battlefield!
